Local News. For Local People.

I’m getting ready to head off to London tomorrow – an old uni pal’s birthday, a couple of days work, then a couple of days holiday to see other friends. I’ve remarked before about how it feels to be itinerant in a place where you were once before fixed. Since this will be my first visit south since moving to Aberdeenshire, I expect that a week of dodging between hotels and people’s spare rooms will prove to be very strange indeed.

Of course, the idea that you’re going to be living a permanently cosmopolitan and vibrant lifestyle in London soon runs into exactly the same constraints as it would anywhere else. The whirlwind impression of the place you would get from a weekend city-break packed with museums, Ferris wheels, musicals and nightclubs, must be set aside the need to manage your finances, do your shopping, clean the house and endure the drudge of the daily commute. Just like Edinburghers tend not to visit the Castle, Londoners aren’t living it up every night in the West End.

So, life in London can be every bit as mundane as it is everywhere else. And boy, is this mundanity reflected in the local TV news. Tedious Mayoral intrigue, murders in Peckham, tube delays, vapid Oxford Street vox pops, lost budgies in Brockley, the latest transfer news from Leyton Orient… all important to someone, no doubt, but still hardly at the cutting edge of anything much.

Frankly, any faux sophisticate who wants to criticise Reporting Scotland for being parochial should be made to watch a week of the London news - on loop. You’ll soon develop an appreciation for the job which BBC Scotland manages on fairly limited resources. Which brings me onto one of my favourite topics.

One of the rationales given by BBC Scotland Controller Ken McQuarrie for sidelining a ‘’Scottish 6’ was that the BBC was going to pursue more local news in Scotland, using the internet as a delivery vehicle. While BBC Scotland now has regional news pages within the Scottish news section of the BBC website, the intention was always to do more, in terms of providing professionally produced video content.

A worthy enough idea in itself, but hardly an answer to the shortcomings of the overall news coverage offered to Scottish viewers. After all, it’s not as if anyone sits at home saying ‘You know, all this duplication of Scottish stories and coverage about the English education minister getting slow hand clapped by the NUT is fine, but what would really make news relevant to me is being able to get vox pops from the folk in my local shopping centre’.

So, it was with great interest that I stumbled over this item, which seems to sound the death-knell for micro-local (if I can call it that) news coverage from the BBC. While the state of most local ITV newsrooms might be deplorable, I’m not convinced it’s the job of an already far superior BBC to further undermine their business model.

Of course, the Scottish Broadcasting Commission, in calling for a digital Scottish channel, has in many ways moved this whole debate on. There’s a strong argument that a distinct, Scottish-based public service broadcaster could provide at least some incentive for the best artistic talent to spend more time pursuing their craft in Scotland, instead of being always drawn to the bright lights of London. To me, that’s far more important from a creative, cultural and economic standpoint than any news bulletin, however it is packaged.

I’ve been quite impressed with BBC Alba since it began, despite not having a word of the language myself. Of course, some folks will never be able to get past the fact that it’s in a ‘foreign’ language, and will bump their gums about their hard earned tax dollars being squandered on such a frivolity. However, my tax dollars are spent on aspects of BBC output which have zero interest for me – Radio 1, for instance. Eastenders. Formula 1 racing. But I’m still glad these things are there for others.

Clearly, given current viewing figures, BBC Alba’s content has an appeal which transcends the language barrier. If that’s what can be done on what is, let’s face it, a shoestring budget, then an English language Scottish channel could be just the thing to dip in and dip out of.

I was sceptical about a Scottish Channel when the Commission first produced its report, since maybe unusually for a supporter of independence, I was quite happy for the BBC to continue as was, but with a fairer distribution of resources and a Scottish ‘6’. Nonetheless, a new channel would give us the option of doing so much more than simply giving a better integrated roundup of world events as they relate to Scotland.

I can hear the squeals of anguish already. However, thanks to the wonders of digital TV, it’s possible for me to watch the BBC News for Oxfordshire or the Channel Islands if I so desire, just as it’s possible for me to skip Newsnight Scotland and carry on watching the Brit version post-11pm (as I sometimes do). If there were a ‘Scottish 6’ on BBC Scotland, you could still, if delicate sensibilities were offended, watch the UK-wide version. No-one need ever know your sordid little secret :-)

However, this is a matter on which most unionist minds in Westminster and Holyrood are closed. Given Labour’s shameful bullying of the BBC both pre- and post-Hutton, short of an SNP landslide at the next election to provoke a wholesale buying-off of Scottish public opinion, I just don’t see it happening.

Still, with this report from the BBC Trust, yet another of the arguments mustered previously against a Scottish-produced evening bulletin has fallen. If it’s not going to happen on BBC 1, let’s see what a new Scottish channel, with all the other attendant benefits for cultural life, is able to do instead.

With 9% of licence fees coming from Scotland which has just 8.5% of the UK population, you’re already paying for it but not getting it. And if you want to stick with the conventional UK-wide content, then with digital switchover you’ll be able to do exactly that. It’s not as if anyone’s going to be jamming the signal at Berwick, after all.